UK Economy Dashboard

How to read the UK economy dashboard

Each card shows the latest official figure, how much it has moved over the period you pick (1, 2 or 5 years), and a small chart of the path it took. The date at the bottom is the period the figure covers, not when it was published. Most UK data arrives a month or two after the period it describes, while interest rates, gilt yields and the exchange rate update every working day.

Prices versus pay. Inflation tells you how fast prices are rising; wage growth tells you how fast pay is rising. The gap between them is your real pay rise. Right now regular pay is growing at 3.70% and CPI inflation is 3.50%, so real pay is rising by about 0.2 percentage points a year.

Bank Rate, gilts and your mortgage. Bank Rate (3.75%) feeds straight into tracker and variable mortgages and into easy-access savings rates. Fixed mortgage rates follow what markets expect rates to do next, which is why they track the 10-year gilt yield (5.33%) and swap rates more closely than Bank Rate itself. The average 2-year fix is currently 5.13%.

Your deposit sets your rate. Lenders price by loan-to-value (LTV): the share of the home's value you borrow. A 2-year fix currently averages 5.01% at 60% LTV (a 40% deposit) against 5.70% at 95% LTV (a 5% deposit). If a fixed deal ends and you do nothing, you move to your lender's standard variable rate, which averages 6.58%.

Debt and repossessions. UK households owe £1.73tn in mortgages and £261.2bn in consumer credit, £83.7bn of it on credit cards. Signs of trouble show up first as possession claims, when lenders go to court after months of missed payments: there were 5,232 in Q2 2026 (down 20% on a year earlier) and 1,008 repossessions by county court bailiffs. Write-offs show what lenders have given up on recovering.

• Unemployment is a lagging indicator: it usually rises after the economy has already slowed.
• GDP growth below zero for two quarters in a row is the usual shorthand for a recession.
• Government debt as a share of GDP matters for how much room the Chancellor has for tax cuts or spending.
• The pound against the dollar affects import prices, petrol and the cost of US holidays and investments.